The present invention relates to antimicrobial cationic polycarbonate polymers, and more specifically, to cationic polycarbonate homopolymers and random copolymers having 85 mol % to 100 mol % cationic carbonate repeat units.
The increasing presence of antibiotic resistant bacteria has caused an urgent need to develop new antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides have high activity, biocompatibility and excellent selectivity. However, despite over 1000 antimicrobial peptides having been identified, only four peptides have successfully entered phase III clinical trials for wound healing. The primary reasons for their extremely limited use arises from challenging syntheses, high construction costs and in vivo instability due to protease degradation. Synthetic cationic polymers offer inherently lower cost alternatives that lack enzyme recognition. Synthetic polymers bearing cationic charges can analogously associate with bacterial membranes through comparable electrostatic interactions. Furthermore, synthetic cationic polymers can be readily synthesized to have hydrophobic regions capable of being integrated within bacterial membranes. However, increasing hydrophobicity in an effort to gain activity has often proved problematic because of selectivity loss as evidenced by dramatic increases in hemolytic activity and/or cytotoxicity.
Thus, synthetic antimicrobial polymers are sought having enhanced antimicrobial activity without sacrificing microbial selectivity.